Warning: Contains spoilers for One Piece episode #1100.One Piece episode #1100 finally covered one of the biggest moments from the Egghead Island arc: the rematch between Luffy and Lucci. With how popular Luffy and Lucci’s original fight was, the idea of a rematch between them received a lot of attention from people, and sure enough, the anime went to great lengths to sell it as a major event.
Whether it was the anime or the manga, Luffy and Lucci’s rematch was a big event, but the anime was clearly the superior of the two. The corresponding manga chapter featured appropriately stunning artwork and fight choreography, but it still fell short in some regards and couldn’t fully deliver on how big of a fight it was supposed to be.
By comparison, One Piece episode #1100 did a much better job of selling how big Luffy and Lucci’s rematch was supposed to be, and that perfectly highlights how much further the anime can take things compared to the manga.
While the manga had great artwork and fight choreography, thanks to its incredible animation and overall direction, One Piece episode #1100 made a much bigger visual spectacle of Luffy and Lucci’s rematch, doing a much better job of highlighting the scale of the fight and how big of a deal it’s supposed to be. As such, as great as the corresponding manga chapter was, the anime simply outdid its source material.
Rather than simply adapting what was present in the manga, One Piece episode #1100 was filled with original content to add more to Luffy and Lucci’s rematch, even having a minute of the two engaging in regular martial arts as opposed to using any of their special abilities. Extending the fight like that also helped to heighten and emphasize the scale of it all, and it helped to make One Piece episode #1100 one of the anime’s best episodes, yet.
One Piece episode #1100’s depiction of Luffy and Lucci’s fight is far above the original manga, and there are some good reasons for that. With One Piece being a weekly serialization, there’s only so much space for content and only so much time to deliver it, a stark contrast to the flexibility that’s afforded in animation. As such, One Piece’s anime did a better job with Luffy and Lucci’s rematch simply because the anime had the freedom to go all out with it, something that the manga never would have been able to do.
That isn’t to say that the manga did a bad job with things, of course. The artwork and choreography were still top-notch, and considering how the original manga chapter had to couple Luffy and Lucci’s fight with Vegapunk’s exposition on Devil Fruits, the manga’s depiction of things is probably the best that could have been managed on Eiichiro Oda’s timeframe.
If anything, One Piece episode #1100’s depiction of the rematch between Luffy and Lucci is further proof of how far the anime can take the material of the already stellar manga, and with any luck, there will be even better examples of that, going forward.
One Piece releases new episodes on Saturdays on Crunchyroll.
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